sophie and james have ended up in south america

Coroico

2007-10-03T21:34:00.000+01:00

So, since our last blog we've travelled to the highest navigable water in the world, the highest city on the continent, the highest and largest salt flats, some weird geizers, a green lake full of arsenic, and a red lake full of flamingos. We also got our bag nicked in La Paz and have lost all our photos. Bastards.

We bought 2 cameras in La Paz, but no memory card, so here are the 7 photos that our camera holds. It should illustrate the hard life we're having in Coroico, Bolivia, in the week before our return to the real world.

bug
kitchen crisps
bug

me being a real man

fuzzyhair

PS: We took a normal camera to the salt flats and national park and took 72 photos of varying quality. Once we find a photo developer's that'll put them onto cd for us we'll upload them and talk about that. It's the weirdest place ive ever been to.

Update:

2007-09-19T02:30:00.000+01:00

HOLY SHIT, ALIENS!!!1

we're passing through the puno region in a few hours time. I'll report back on any glowing children.

To Cuzco, Bankruptcy, and Some Quite Big Ruins...

2007-09-18T18:46:00.000+01:00

We splashed out on a superdeluxeluxuryclass Cruz Del Sur coach for the 20 hours to Cuzco and i sat on the floor on the bottom deck because i couldn't stand the constant, ceaseless, hairpin swerving, threw up most of the way nonetheless, and got someone else's shit on my feet.

Cuzco is very nice, superbly picturesque, but definitely not worth the utter MISERY of that ride. Nor the altitude sickness, which appears to have rather unfairly affected the non-smoker. I am thouroughly thrilled to be ascending another thousand metres or so tonight, on another overnight fairground ride that is already making me feel gross.

Cuzco.With kid that ran in front of us.

Assuming that i should include some information about what we have actually come here to do: Machu Picchu is a letdown. If you want to pay a fortune to stand around in the cold and see some ruins that you could see the equivalent of in both scale and grandeur elsewhere for next to free (and in nice warm weather), then that is something that is entirely dependent on how willing you are to fritter away money, and how able you are to see through the brightly coloured Inka Kola t-shirts that are obscuring your view. Although, there was this bonkers group of new-age-crisis-aged American women that were quite amusing. They stood around in circles, eyes shut and holding hands, serenely swaying in people's way. Summoning their money's worth no doubt.
And here are the pictures i am supposed to put up:

Looking absol

It was a bit of a chore getting to the site. We pretty much just plainly couldn't afford the tourist train tickets (there is no road to Aguas Calientes, the nearest town) and Peru Rail don't allow tourists on the local train. Partially though, we wanted an adventure. This involved visiting some ruins in the Sacred Valley, getting a shared car to Santa Maria, a combi to Santa Teresa, a combi to a hydro plant, a walk along the train tracks in the dark, and more or less the same on the return leg. Unfortunately, our 2007 guidebook is not always as up to date as it could be, and the route is now a much plied gringo trail, which will cost you triple what you think it will.

I think the highlight of the excursion was probably our visit to Pisac:

Pisac market.
Pisac ruins...

Ollantaytambo.
Other less cultured Sophie and James activities include:
Smashing rocks.
Lying down.
Being James.

In conclusion, an update on our disaster-dodging so far: On Saturday, the town we are going to tonight was hit by a meteor which has left a hundred foot crater and mysteriously caused all the locals to become ill.

Through Ecuador to Trujillo and Lima in Peru

2007-09-12T18:45:00.000+01:00

Since the last blog we've been doing a hell of a lot of travelling and seem to only find computers that don't let us upload our photos. egh. We spent a couple more days in Bogota and took the cable car up to the top of an overlooking mountain. Bogota is a bit big.

We then took an overnight bus to Popayan somewhere south of Bogota for a bit of rest in an old colonial town, before heading over the border into Ecuador. We met a Peruvian guy who predictably enough thought that a lot of Ecuadoreans were arseholes, but it meant our border crossing was relatively painless. Niether of us got cavity searches, although an official did put his screwdriver through the backplate of my backpack.

Our time in Ecuador was brief. We'd been on buses for over 12 hours and just slept away our first evening in Quito, and then checked the place out the following day before heading down to Cuaca.

Days of constant bus travelling began to take their toll.

Crossing the Ecuador - Peru border was a nightmare. We picked the shortest way to cross, and decided that despite our guidebook describing it as "harrowing", we would be ok since it was early in the morning, and would be quieter. Annoyingly, our bus to the border arrived at 4:00am instead of 6:30am so the place was in utter darkness, with only the most determined rip-off merchants around, knowing full well that you have no other choice. Getting through the border took us about 2 hours and cost us 17 quid in con-men taxi drivers. But at least we got to the bus terminal with plenty of time, and got on our way to Trujillo in Peru.

The journey there looked mostly like this for me:

And like this for Sophie:

Trujillo is a weird place. We thought it would be a welcome break from the cold weather of Bogota and Quito (2nd and 3rd highest cities in outh America respectably) since it's on the coast. But this place has a cold ocean wind that made it much the same, and almost negligible rainfall. All the farming and errigation is made possible by ancient and not so ancient canal and irrigation systems that collect water from some of the surrounding mountains and rivers. All the houses are mud brick, but seem to be quite sturdy. Especially the walls of the temple of the moon, which have stood for over 1000 years.

So, here's Huaca de la Luna, a Moche temple (coupled with the Temple of the Sun) witch was part of an ancient pre-Inca city. It looks shit from the outside. At least we managed to get a hairless dog in the photo though.

The paintwork on these things hasn't been touched up, its the original colours from 1000 years ago.

And here is another photo of that beautiful dog.

The morning would be complete without me standing in front of a mescaline-containing San Pedro cactus.

In the afternoon we went to Chan Chan, a Chimu city of up to 30,000 people that lasted for over 500 years, before the Inca's took it over in the 15th century. Archaeologists have restored a lot of the walls and such, but when the last earthquake hit, all the restored walls crumbled, and all the old original walls stayed standing exactly how they were. So it seems the Chimu knew how to build sandcastles.

Next stop was Lima, the capital of Peru. We were only stopping there for a rest and for the connecting bus to Cuzco, but had a nice wonder around Miraflores; the old, gringo friendly, wolley-hat-selling area of Lima.

james...

2007-08-30T21:47:00.001+01:00

... shouldn't take so many pictures of me looking daft.

Merida and Bogota

2007-08-30T20:51:00.000+01:00

So, we haven't seen any big snakes/ reptiles/ nasty things that bite since Sophie's last blog, mostly due to us not having the time or money to go on a 3 day excursion into the jungle. These things are expensive and always seem to be run by Germans. Not that they'd be any cheaper if done by any other nationality of course.

What we did do however, was go to Merida, a city nestled in the middle of a rather large valley.

Me annoying Sophie with the camera as the bus careened around the side of mountains.

The peaks around the valley can reach over 4km and the highest has one of those bloody Bolivar statues that seem to be around every corner of every town in every south american country. We stayed in this place run by Germans (again) and Sophie made me go horse riding.

1. James doesn't like horses
2. James thinks it's odd that we still sit on animals

So basically, i was shitting myself. So thankfully, to put my mind at rest, i soon learnt that:

1. We weren't going to be wearing helmets
2. We were going to be riding through a JUNGLE
3. The other 4 in the group were drinking aniseed flavoured cane liquor

I got on the horse and after about 10 minutes of praying i wouldn't fall off into a river, i learnt that i had the most docile, ignorant and slowest horse in the whole ranch, and began to enjoy it. Huzah!

Thankfully, you cant quite see the panic in mine or Sophie's eyes. My horse is eating. It did this a lot.

As did Sophie's.

I don't really understand the cowboy hat obsession myself

Or why the French guy with the camera turned it onto black and white mode. Maybe it went with the hats.

We spent the next day trying to walk normally around Merida whilst finding camping shops (one was crap, one didn't exist, and one was closed. pfft)

The square, with some mountains behind, covered with clouds. Some of them had snow on them.

The next day, we took off to the Colombian border via bus and then taxi. In our guidebook it says that many taxis will take you over the border for $20, stopping for exit and entry stamps and whatnot along the way, and this seemed like a good idea compared to waiting for a busload of people to get their passports stamped before moving on. Unfortunately, the taxi driver we ended up with didn't have a clue what he was doing, bungled through the towns on either side of the border, banged the taxi into a lamp post and possibly someone's truck, and got us to the airport for our cheap internal flight about 30 minutes before it was taking off.

So now we're in Bogota. The first thing to say about this place is that it's bloody cold. It's 16 degrees today, and i look at the UK weather report with envy. The UK perception of Bogota is a little unfounded. There are rough parts, like in every city, but this is the first city we've been to that seems to have art, music, fashion and nightlife that a mature capital city should have. We've checked out the gold museum (which has a lot of gold) and the Botero museum (which has a lot of fat people) and Sophie has spotted a woolly jumper that will make her look even more like Marla Singer than she normally does.

PS. Sophie bought a poncho and gnome hat in Merida

sophie and james have ended up in SOUTH america...

2007-08-23T18:45:00.000+01:00

We seem to be travelling in more or less complete ignorance of extreme weather disasters taking place across the continent, haphazardly arriving at new destinations with eyes averted from hurricanes and/or earthquakes. In fact, upon arrival at Caracas, the closest either of us came to being concerned about the hurricane taking place in the country was to babble about the ridiculously heavy rain delaying our flight.

I have to mention here that amidst the airport-wide yelling, crying, confusion and people demanding courtesy 500km taxi rides, the officials at our desk told us that there was no plane for us. When shouts immediately began about the plane that had been sitting outside our terminal for the past three hours, we were told: "Well, there is no crew". Ten minutes later, over 3 hours late, we took the invisible unmanned flight across to Margarita Island, couldn't get my card to work, couldn't pay our taxi driver, and were greeted by a security guard who had no idea who i was, a very locked door, and a broken intercom with my parents 9 storeys above us. We were in South America, and we were eventually bailed out by my mother running about in a swimsuit and sarong at midnight wondering where the hell we were.

The next week was nice and EASY. I hardly had to say a word in spanish, courtesy of my aunty Karina, and we didn't really do anything. At all. Except sun ourselves and eat, which of course we did in abundance.

A week later we took a ferry to the mainland and a bus to Ciudad Bolivar, where we found a nice hostel run by some Germans who served really bad food. Teamed with 3 days in Canaima on a trip to see Angel Falls, where the food was either chicken or egg with chicken or egg (i don't eat chicken), i reckon we have just about atoned for the sheer gustatory decadence of our holiday from our holiday now. It is a hard life, after all...

Anyway. Despite the direct negative correlation between the cost of a tour to the Falls and my enjoyment of it, i would reccommend that anyone sold a body part in order to be able to go. We flew (me with my eyes squeezed shut) by Cessna to the camp and took a four hour boat to watch a lot of water drop off a big rock, got wet, slept in hammocks, got cold, got the boat back, got wet and cold, went to another waterfall, walked behind it, got very very wet, dried off then went for a beer and got rained on. It was amazing. Hopefully the pictures speak for themselves.

The sun came out the next day...

Sapo Falls

Brown water. Good for the skin, apparently.

This morning we set off for Los Llanos, but have got as far as back into Ciudad Bolivar. The bus doesn't leave till the evening, hence the massive blog update. We both have high hopes for seeing some big snakes/ reptiles/ nasty things that bite once we get there, but judging by previous luck with excursions we might see a llama.

Costa Rica and Panama

2007-08-23T18:34:00.000+01:00

AHH. Finally we've ended up in south america, and have ended up finding somewhere to access the internet with computers that almost work. I've been given the task of writing about Costa Rica and Panama, whilst Sophie has elected to talk about Venezuela, in which we saw some waterfall.

We left Grenada and grabbed a bus to the border with Costa Rica, and took a coach from there. We organised with a Ticabus employee to be dropped off in Liberia so we could make out way to Fortuna. This was supposed to take about 2 hours or so, but of course, the Ticabus employee never got on the Ticabus, and we never got to Liberia. We ended up spending 9 hours on a freezing air conditioned bus to San Jose, Costa Rica's capital. All the coaches in central and south america like to turn the AC onto max, and we've been caught out several times by not packing jumpers and trousers, especially on this one, when we assumed we'd only be on for 2 hours max.
San Jose is a little bit nicer than a lot of other capital cities in central america but also annoyingly expensive. Thankfully we blended in like locals, what with my fluent spanish and the BRIGHT PINK WRIST BANDS that the hostel made us wear. The first chance we got we headed up north.

Fortuna

This place is fairly small, and doesnt have a great deal to do. But it does have a massive active volcano towering over it, which makes up for it.

This is the only photo in the daytime that we got of the volcano without clouds covering 70% of it. The photo is an odd shape because Sophie was gurning at the bottom of it.

Whilst there, we stayed in "Costa Rica´s 5 star hostel". This just meant that instead of 1 double bed in our room we had two, and instead of something useful like a table, we got a TV with 100 spanish channels and HBO. It had a pool though i guess.

That evening we took a hike through a bit of the jungle to the other side of the volcano, but just like with Tikal, the clouds ruined EVERYTHING. When night fell, we drove back and managed to take these prize-winning photos

After all the excitement of seeing lava flowing out of a volcano (or possibly a small animal with a cigarette lighter having a laugh) we went to the amusingly named Baldi hot springs, which, apart from the disco music (!?) and being charged 66%Vat on a bottle of water, was pretty good. And very, very hot. They had pools of various temperatures and a couple of them had bars attached and such. Its very strange swimming in water the temperature of a hot bath. And very tiring too once you've had a drink.

Monteverde
The next day we got our stuff together and headed over to Monteverde, Costa Rica's other massive tourist trap. We took a "Jeep - Boat - Jeep" package to get there (actually minibus - pleasure boat - minibus) and arrived early enough to go and do this:

Obviously we thought it'd be a great idea to forget the camera, so you get a lovely stock image from their website to see what we got up to. In short: Sophie shat herself at the height of the first (and lowest) cable, but realised it was actually amazing after about 5 seconds, and we both saw a beautiful (albeit fast) view of the jungle canopy, sliding down 15 cables that went above and through the jungle and made us feel like a cross between an ewok and indiana jones.

We had to embark in the morning on a 5 hour journey back to San Jose, which took a little longer thanks to a tire exploding on the motorway. We were quite grateful for a journey that only took a mere 5 hours however, because we knew that once we got to San Jose we'd be faced with one that would take SIXTEEEEEN HOURS. But of course, nothing goes to plan, and the 10pm bus was full, meaning we had to wait until the next day and catch the one at noon. Which meant another night with a fluorescent "rob-me" bracelet surrounded by what might as well have been freshers.

Costa Rica to Panama

Basically, the 16 hour bus ride started like this:

And ended like this:

In which time i managed to read a small Marquez book, watch two crap films (one staring stephen sigal saving a polish orphan) and eat far too much junk food.

Panama

We arrived in Panama City at around 5.00am, which is a beautiful time to arrive in a capital city, having not slept, carrying a backpack and not having a map. We spent some time in a 24 hour cafe we found until the hostel was open, and then dumped our bags and tried to get to a shopping mall so we could just watch a dumb film until we could check in properly at 2pm. We weren't very successful at most of what we tried to do that day, but we did spend some time in wandering around the skyscrapers, looking around the old town, and getting stalked around a panama canal museum by every employee that was working.

The next day we went to the Panama Canal and i managed to forget the camera again and tried to make up for it by buying the two least-shit postcards they had. One boat looks the same as another i guess. These things were pretty massive though, and in a geeky way i kinda liked the whole engineering feat that was accomplished, even if it was for the exciting world of shipping things.

Afterwards we went to this massive shop that sells all things indian and bought too many throws, incense, and soap that'll strip the skin out of your nose from 50 paces.

Nicaragua

2007-08-01T19:38:00.000+01:00

León

We spent a couple of nights in Leon before heading out to a little seaside town called Las Peñitas, where we spent 3 nights. Leon is historically rather liberal and the ammount of sandinista flags, revolutionary murals and plaques is pretty crazy. We stayed in a hostel about 30m from where the poet Rigoberto López Pérez assassinated Anastasio Somoza García in 1956. It also has the "largest cathedral in central america" although it's size looks suspiciously similar to that of the cathedral in Granada, Leon's historic enemy.

Me knackered upon arrival at the hostel in Leon. 35 degrees and a backpack are a horrible combination:

The plaque where Pérez killed Somoza Garcia and some FSLN paint:

The biggest cathedral in central america, alledgedly:

Some of the political murals that are dotted around the city:

Las Peñitas

We arrived via chickenbus and once sorted, set about breaking our necks in the rough waves of the pacific side of Nicaragua's coast. I think seawater was running out of our noses for at least the rest of the day, and i managed to go deaf in one ear instantly upon the first wave slapping me in the face and dragging me under. BAH. We went back to pull the heads off prawns and drink beer and lazed around until the storm came in. We successfully got stuck in the bar during torrential rain and a powercut with no torch and no camera, so you'll have to take me word for it when i say that the fork lightening over the sea was a bit good.

The next day we made sure we were armed with a camera in case any storms crept up on us again but sadly we just had to put up with this sunset instead.

Check out sophie posing with waves.

Hammock

Hammock

Gay Drink Pig at the sea

Granada

We arrived in Granada the night before last and trapsed around looking for a hostel that wasn't either shit or full. In the end we decided to splash out on a nearby 4 star hotel for 3 days. I was cringing at spending all that money on a hotel when we could have just found a dorm room or something but then i realised i was getting angry over 12 quid each a night. hrrm.

We havent done all that much yet here in Granada, save for wander around and find somewhere with the internet that we can use to find where to check out in Costa Rica, and where to stay.

Granada is pretty different to Leon. Gone are the anarchosocialist black and reds and the broken buildings and in their place are swanky refurbished colonial hotels and nice little cafes owned by far-too-cheerful americans.

PS. sophie has broken her 7 day stint of not having a shit.

Rio Dulce – Fronteras – Rio Lampara – Livingston – San Pedro Sula – Tegucigalpa – Managua – León.

2007-07-27T23:34:00.000+01:00

I woke up convinced that we had another hour or so to go until we would arrive at Fronteras, a town on the Rio Dulce, but was almost immediately proven wrong, shuffled off the bus and left standing dozy with sleep on the wrong side of one of Central America’s longest bridges. I left my headband on the bus. I liked it.

Stalking irritatedly off over the bridge.

We stayed at the Hostel Backpackers on the opposite bank, which was possibly the noisiest hostel I have ever attempted to sleep in. The combination of loud music, loud people, and ludicrously loud frogs (even excluding allowances for a normal tropical racket) made for an awkward night spent tossing and sweating in a fan-less room. We were up and out early, but once away from Rio Dulce things got pretty good.

Not the best picture, but a view out over Rio Dulce.

We hired a boat to take us to El Hotelito Perdido, a fairly new, small, and well kept hostel on the Rio Lampara. Our hosts were enthusiastic, entertaining people with great culinary skills and extensive travel knowledge, so things were made really easy whilst there, and I think I relaxed properly for the first time since we left the UK. It’s out in the middle of the jungle, basically, and only accessible by boat, so we had zero money worries, safety worries, and seeing as we didn’t have the choice but to eat or drink anywhere else, there really wasn’t a great deal to think about. The most energetic activity we undertook was kayaking to some hot springs ten minutes around the corner.

Our room at El Hotelito Perdido.

View up Rio Lampara.

Nice evenings at the hostel.

Only problem was this: mosquitoes, mosquitoes, mosquitoes, mosquitoes, spiders the size of your fully splayed hand, snakes that will kill you in 2 hours (worrying when the nearest hospital is an hour and a half away by boat), and the scorpion I nearly stepped on. It ran away and didn’t appear in our room again, until a couple of days later when it turned up on the wall behind the partition separating me and James from another couple. We were battling the mosquitoes in our net when she started whimpering and her boyfriend made a loose attempt at convincing her there was only a “giant grasshopper” in their room. Anyway, after many tense minutes he managed to batter it with a water bottle and yank it apart with a pair of pliers and a jackknife. Not really that excessive, I thought, fully aware that I would have hollered at James until he had done no less. Or until he threw it at me. Whichever.

We were both fairly ill at this point. I reckon from swimming, and washing ourselves and our clothes in river water, and of course, from your cursory bout of intolerance to a change in diet. It would have been no more than an annoyance had we not decided to head back in the direction of cities, people, concrete, and normal sized mosquitoes. So as things were, we had to get on some really long bus rides feeling utterly shaky.

Livingston was the next stop: a Caribbean port town with muddy beaches. The sinkhole of all Rio Dulce’s crap. We took a boat to Puerto Barrios, had a crisis with a lack of toilet, got a bus to the border, got ripped off, got another bus from the border to somewhere, and another to San Pedro Sula. I have nothing good to say about that city. It has no street names, few street signs, no addresses, no central bus station, and absolutely no respite for those foreign twats that have undertook the task of carrying their lives for however many months around on their backs. I shouted a lot. Eventually we found a bus station and got out.

Tegucigalpa was no better. We left first thing in the morning for Managua. And there ended our day and a half visit to

Honduras

We’re now in León, north-west of Managua, Nicaragua, and things are nice again. I have spent all day rolling around sunning myself by a pool like a fat wrinkly brown date, and I intend to keep up the slovenly British behaviour for AT LEAST another three days. James is trying to convince me to go volcano boarding. Pfft.

Flores and Tikal

2007-07-27T22:15:00.000+01:00

Tikal

Just after the last blog we had a miniature tragedy and lost all our photos, which was rather annoying. Since then we´ve been traveling in places with no internet or simply not had the time, so now you´ll be subjected to a bit of a deluge. Sophie is sat beside me typing away about our exploits in Rio Dulce, Guatemala, and the wonderful Honduran cities of San Pedro Sula and Tegucigalpa.

The day after the last blog we went to Tikal.

It was a bit good.

We got up at stupid o'clock to get in a bus from Flores to take us to see the sunrise from Temple Number 4, the highest temple at tikal and the 2nd highest on the continent. The 60m of wooden steps up there were knackering at that time in the morning but at least it was still cold. Sadly, it was all too foggy but the noises were incredible. We heard the scary-as-shit Howler Monkeys (you can probably hear them on youtube.com) as they woke up, and some Toucans and Vultures and such.

Here's a really crap view above the jungle canopy due to really crap fog.

Eventually it brightened up and we went along our merry way through the jungle getting freaked out by more Howler monkeys, and enough ants to carry half our group away. Here´s what the top of Temple 4 looked like from the ground, poking out of the trees 70m high:

I know i should have been reminded of Apocalypto or something, but it reminded me of the Jungle Book more. Hmmff.

We eventually came to another temple, which didnt seem half as threatening, and had climbable steps so we didnt need to use daunting wooden steps like the previous one. Unfortunately the stone steps were massive, and once at the top Sophie remembered that she's actually scared of heights. A perfectly timed recollection. So well timed in fact that when we got to this beast, there was no way she was going up it:

So it was left to me. A guy too hairy and white to be doing something like that in a jungle. This one was 50m high and from the top you could see some of the other Temples jutting out of the forest. This was also a bit good.

After a bit more walking and a few more Temples and such, in which sophie pulled a sheepish / impressed face, amongst other things, we got to the famous Tikal postcard place, the Grand Plaza. This part was the first to get cleared when archaeologists started major work on it in the 2nd half of the last century so it´s a bit more like how it would have been and less like ruins-in-a-jungle.

Flores

The rest of our time in Flores was spent doing very little. It's a rather beautiful island connected to the mainland by a 700m bridge. We rented a canoe and boated around the lake in a mostly wobbly zig-zag motion and parked it on the other shoreline to the mainland town to enjoy a bag of chilli flavoured plantain crisps (we're very sophisticated), and wondered around drinking and getting bitten by insects.

We ate nachos in another hostel on the island and sophie made a friend. We later found out through some slightly annoying Canadians in Rio Dulce that the kitten had been found in a plastic bag on the street by a friend of the hostel owner.

The trip to the Los Amigos hostel also proved quite useful since we picked up a flier for a place near Rio Dulce which looked really cool. We ended up staying there for 3 nights, and im sure Sophie will talk about it at length in the next post.

Chetumal- Belize City- Flores

2007-07-17T23:51:00.000+01:00

I slept, mouth agape, through the 6 or so hours to Chetumal whilst James watched some atrociously bad films, (including Ong-Bak dubbed into Spanish), and was quite unpleasantly surprised to wake up at a bus station in the middle of steaming hot nowhere. The town turned out to be quite nice actually, once we found it. But we couldn't seem to get pissed anywhere despite many hours spent wandering, sweating, salivating..

View up the street from our room in Chetumal.

By some obelisk in Chetumal.

The plan from there went slightly awry, but now we can say we've been to Belize! It was more or less accidental and mostly cos we were lazy and missed the one-a-day 6am bus to Flores from Chetumal. So, we were told to catch a bus to Belize City and make a change for a border town called Benque, but we decided to spend the night. It's an expensive dump.

James looking very impressed at the bus station in Belize.

Whatever information we had been given previously was wrong, and by pure luck I spotted a sign saying 'buses to Flores' on our way out of the hostel. This saved us an expensive taxi ride from the border, but proved unnecessarily arduous. Had we only not been in such a frantic hurry to get a ticket (especially seeing as there was no rush whatsoever thanks to my having forgotten to change time zones) we would have discovered a bus station full of choices for 1st class buses. Instead we ended up sitting in each other's laps by a window that couldn't open in an oven on wheels for the entire day. BUT WE'RE HERE NOW! In Flores. And it's beautiful. (Good pictures will appear when we have had more time/ can be arsed).

Somewhere along the way.

On the roof at the Flores Tikal hostel.

First thing's first... This hostel is niice.

Cancun

2007-07-14T17:00:00.000+01:00

Well, we're here in downtown cancun, although we're now waiting for a bus to Chetumal so we can get to Flores in Guatemala. I've managed to get rather lobstered already and on the first day Sophie managed to get tanlines on the way to the beach. Most impressive.

Away from the hotel zone there's often not a gringo in sight which isn't what i expected. I expected fat americans on every corner, treating cancun like a more aesthetic Butlins. But its a lot nicer than that. Around the hostel in a little park area some odd Texan hippy with two snakes in his bag told me how he'd spent the last 7 years in south america working on his new philosophy that'll change the world and the night after there was a grindcore / crust punk gig on and it was so odd seeing mexican goths and punks with leather jackets in a climate that leaves me dripping with sweat after about 10 seconds. Damn them and their acclimatised bodies :(

Sophie may very well be posting to this blog at the same time as me, typing away in the cubicle over my shoulder. so we may be going over the same shit as each other, or she may simply be slagging me off. if its the latter, it isn't true and i never did those things.
Yesterday we went to an island off the coast and it was a bit good.

SEEEEEEE:

Palm treeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeees

The water was warmer in the sea than it was in our shower at the hostel. hmm.

Sophie with an avocado + crisp. we're very sophisticated.

I'm not as red as that now i promise :p

The next post should probably come from Guatemala in a day or two. We'll be staying in Flores so we can check out Tikal and drink cheap beer. Tah-rah!

Adventure Anticipation

2007-07-10T23:11:00.000+01:00

4 hours before we need to get up and i can't decide whether to sleep or weep -it seems like an inordinately long time since we booked this trip. Neither of us can remember when that was, thanks to the various stresses of living our extraordinarily complex lifestyles... Not abused memories/ initial lack thereof. Of course.

first post

2007-07-06T22:23:00.000+01:00

I've spent the last half an hour not preparing my bag, but rather, poking around the internet trying to find the name of the artist who never created a work catalogued as number 1, but rather went straight on to creating number 2, 3, 4, 5 etc, because he never liked beginnings.

Despite not being able to find out who it was who did this, i feel far more comfortable now ive created a first post that's completely pointless.